Discussion: Leading a Service Learning Strategy Project

While reading and learning about educational methods is useful and informative, carrying them out is invaluable. During the previous weeks, you have interacted with videos about service learning, case studies, and scholarly material aimed at helping you develop your own Service Learning Strategy Project. In this Discussion, you will confer with your colleagues about your progress. This discussion opportunity can shape your thinking about the components you are working on throughout the course, which lead to the completion of your Service Learning Strategy Project. Be sure to take full advantage of Learning Resources like the Toolkit for the Evaluation of Service-Learning Programs(Caswell et al., 2011) and the Service Reflection Toolkit (Northwest Service Academy, n.d.; assigned in Week 6) to construct your response.

To prepare

Review the Learning Resources for this week, and revisit the Learning Resources from other weeks, to assist you in synthesizing the information into your thinking regarding the challenges of planning for engaging instruction with service learning.

Post a summary of your thinking in which you do the following:

• Describe an issue or challenge you have encountered as you develop your Service Learning Strategy Project and how you addressed the issue or challenge (e.g., buy-in from stakeholder groups, assessment of community needs, articulation of a vision for the service and learning components).
• Share resources that have been particularly helpful for you and explain why.
• Explain one or more insights you gained from the living case studies and/or videos related to Service Learning.
• Explain how you see the evaluation of service learning conducted in all these examples.

Attached is my service learning project topic with the issues I have encountered.